Goyescas

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Goyescas is a piano suite written in 1911 by Spanish composer Enrique Granados. This piano suite is usually considered Granado's crowning creation and was inspired by the paintings of Francisco Goya, although the piano pieces have not been authoratively associated with any particular paintings.

Goyescas is also a nationalistic one-act opera in three scenes, written in 1916 by Granados to a Spanish libretto by Fernando Periquet y Zuaznabar, made up with melodies from the piano version.

[edit] Piano suite

The piano writing of Goyescas is highly ornamented and extremely difficult to master, requiring both subtle digital manipulations and great power. Some of them have a strong improvisational feel, the clearest example of this being the fifth piece, called El Amor y La Muerte (Love and Death). The fourth piece in the series (Quejas, ñ la Maja y el Ruiseñor—The Maiden and the Nightingale) is the best known piece from the suite. It resembles a nocturne, but is filled with intricate figurations, inner voices and, near the end, glittering bird-like trills and quicksilver arpeggios.

This piano suite is written in two "books" and is entitled Goyescas: los majos enamorados (Goyescas: The Majos in Love). Work on it began in 1909, and by 31 August 1910, the composer was able to write that he had composed "great flights of imagination and difficulty". He completed Book II in December 1911.

Granados himself gave the première of Book I at the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona on 11 March 1911; he gave the first performance of Book II at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on 2 April 1914. El pelele (The straw man), subtitled Escena goyesca, is usually programmed as part of the Goyescas suite; Granados gave the première in Terrasa on 29 March 1914.

[edit] Opera

Granados' opera was inspired by the paintings of Francisco Goya, subtitled Los majos Enamorados ("the gallants of love"). The composer wrote, "I am enamored with the psychology of Goya, with his palette, with him, with his muse the Duchess of Alba, with his quarrels with his models, his loves and flatteries. That whitish pink of the cheeks, contrasting with the blend of black velvet; those subterranean creatures, hands of mother-of-pearl and jasmine resting on jet trinkets, have possessed me."

As noted above the opera was not written as an entirely new work. The opera was based on themes from the famous piano suite, which he orchestrated and augmented to form a three-scene work. The libretto had to be fitted to existing melodies, the reverse of the usual way of writing an opera. The opera is rarely performed, while the piano suite forms part of the standard Romantic piano repertoire.

The opera was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, on January 28, 1916. It was well received by the audience. Its success led to Granados being invited by President Woodrow Wilson to perform a piano recital at the White House. By accepting the invitation, Granados had to postpone his return to Spain. He and his wife lost their lives by drowning on 24 March when their ship, the French steamer Sussex, was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the English Channel; their original travel plans would have avoided this tragedy.

The Intermezzo from the opera is well known as a stand-alone piece, and many arrangements of it have been made.

[edit] Sources

• The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, by John Warrack and Ewan West (1992), 782 pages, ISBN 0-19-869164-5